Mike

[mike]

• Name: Mike
• From: Poland
• Skills / Tools: PHP, Python, Ruby, jQuery, XHTML, HTML5, JS, CSS3, design, photoshop
• Found via: googled for "opensource minecraft clone"
• Interests: I really love to make websites ...
• Extra: ... and i want to help any growing opensource project by helping with website creation. We've speaked on github a bit and i have some ideas and general plan how it all can be done (website stuff). Just waiting for a green light

 

[Cervator]

Welcome! Are you by chance the person on GitHub talking about websites? There is so much activity going on I'd have to dig around for a while just trying to find the exact issue that discussion took place

We do eventually need a nice website for terasology.org - not a lot of plans for what yet, so feel free to get creative and just throw some ideas together

 

[mike]

yeah, that was me on github

So, what i have in mind: The facts are - there is not much to put on a website so far (you've said so), projects like this one finds WIKI friendly. When connecting those two facts together, it looks like it would be nice to install i.e. wordpress + mediawiki and integrate user acconts between those two scripts. Why wordpress? Cause it's easy to maintain and lightweight. However - it's good just for a start. Why not to use something that connects all crucial functionalities under one engine? That's why i think that Drupal will be the best solution for Moving Blocks (or Terasology? i'm not sure what's the exact name of this game). It let's us create a really custom and complex community-based website which will be quite simple at the start (like wordpress - blog posts + static pages) but would be easy possible to be growed to something bigger with more complex functionalities like user galleries, issues tracker and anything you can imagine.

According to forum - do you think that phpBB3 is the best choice? I've worked with this script a lot and i personally think that it's not the best choice for this project. There are some engines which aims to be a bulletin boards for programmers and software projects with stackoverflow/github flow. phpBB is better for forums with a lot of sub-forums and a lot of activity going on. Here we have just three sub-forums. Personally i would recommend a quite better script - vanilla ( http://vanillaforums.org/ ). It aims to be as much usable and convenience for programmers as possible. Also - using drupal + vanilla means that we can integrate everything (website + wiki + forum) in very easy way and it also means that we'll be able to use the same markup as on github everywhere (which is markdown) which is quite cool.

What do you think about it all?

 

[Cervator]

Well, we've got Wordpress in use on MovingBlocks already (which is really Begla's thing, partially set up now to be sort of a "group" thing), so that's certainly a good option to keep. Our wiki is currently Foswiki - which is just something I pushed for as I was familiar with it and knew it could do some of the fancy sneaky stuff Mediawiki doesn't aim for (as it seems to focus on being open and community-like - Foswiki has some nice structured stuff for auto-updates, access control, etc). Forum - I'm not set on phpBB, I figure it was the easy option available on Begla's webhost.

On top of that we've also got Jenkins and GitHub. Longer-term I expected we'd integrate everything together with one user system somehow, short GitHub I suppose. One app becomes primary, rest connect via LDAP. I've done that with Jenkins and Foswiki in the past. I'm sure Mediawiki can integrate with user systems really well, but I haven't looked at the plugins enough to find good access control, structuring, and automation. I'm not sold on Foswiki, just haven't had the time to really dig around with Mediawiki - I just knew it didn't do quite what we needed out of the box.

For a conversion progress - wiki is easy (copy paste), issue tracking stays at GitHub, Wordpress can transfer to Wordpress fairly easily I assume. Forum might be the biggest issue as I'd really like for it to maintain all the posts and user accounts, so unless there's a nice importer for a different tech phpbb might be best to keep as the central system and user base? I think I saw a Foswiki plugin allowing it to integrate with Drupal, Joomla, or something, not sure how the forum would get along with one of those CMSes

.... long story short: If you'd be up for giving it a shot, throw together your favorite related techs, plus Jenkins and a way for us to keep the forum activity (in phpbb or not), all nicely integrated and shiny. Doesn't have to have any content, just be a proof of concept and able to convert over as much as possible in theory. I take it that you have a webhost that can probably handle the setup, if not one of the rest of us probably do. Ultimately if it works out really nice, we tinker and customize it for a while, then we can hook it up to terasology.org which would be our dedicated game / group site

And thanks for signing up!

 

[begla]

I've setup phpBB because I knew it and I had to put all the web-related stuff together on my own. Would love to give this new forum a spin though – never heard of it and It looks and sounds promising.

 

[mike]

yeah, it's also possible to convert phpbb to vanilla through the built in importer so it's all easy to setup and what about my drupal suggestion ?

 

[Cervator]

If it works, it works

If you're comfortable with it and can make it work and be presentable, then go for it

Key is taking a leap forward from current state, not just replicate it with different tools that have potential to get better (lots of stuff we could do better with the current setup too). Getting a user setup working across several tools would be a solid step forward

 

[mike]

Oh, sorry Cervator, i haven't noticed your long post.

My suggestion is to try to lower the amount of tools used for creating a whole movingblocks website. The separate wiki script is nothing crucial in my opinion an could be done with drupal (i don't know if you have any experience with drupal but if not - i'll try to describe it shortly - drupal is a CMS with which you're able to build anything you can imagine, it can be a bulletin board, issue tracker, multi user blog, digg clone, youtube, facebook, wiki etc. etc.). The good thing is that it's possible to create a user groups with special permissions to for example post blog posts, editing wiki etc. It's nice when you want to have everything in one place with one single user database.

So, just to make sure, you want me to create an 'example' website and show you that. We'll descuss it and then, eventually publish it under the main domain, am i right?

So, what are current crucial functionalities ? Multi user blog should do the trick for now ? Just for start, this website can be really simple, it's easy to make it bigger in the future

if you're sceptical for moving a wiki to drupal because amount of work with copy&paste, don't worry, leave it to me

 

[begla]

Just to get my opinion out there: When talking about anything related to the web (and especially Web 2.0) and an overall sophisticated social experience I would love to see Ruby and Ruby on Rails come into play. :ugeek: Do you have experience in this area? I've did a small research on some current CMS using Rails and there are quite a few:

http://refinerycms.com/
http://locomotivecms.com/
http://www.caseincms.com/

http://blog.arunace.com/12-ruby-on-rail ... stems-cms/

And this popped up in 2 minutes of research. I'm sure there are some hidden gems out there.

 

[mike]

hmm yeah, i know ROR but i'm not sure if it's a proper tool in our case (i find it more usefull while creating a very custom projects). Just to be honest - i'm running few personal projects, studying at university and has a job and i'm affraid i don't have enough time for writing everything from scratch, that's why (among other things) i've chosen a drupal which let's me create a complex website with lesser amount of coding. Anyway, can you write me why do you want to use ROR here? Maybe i can be convinced

 

[Cervator]

I'm not too worried about moving the wiki, that's easy, especially with a target wiki with similar syntax.

I'm more interested in the whole package to see how everything interoperates. If that's actually a single package with a lot of flexibility that's fine - if the individual tools are prepared to the point where they meet or beat what we've currently got.

And yeah - I'd like to see it on a sample website, then eventually set it up for terasology.org, then likely for a period of time work on it with tweaks and such before we outright migrate anything. Some things will stay back here anyway (the blog is begla's anyway, maybe copy some stuff forward)

Jenkins with user integration would be good. Forum, wiki, blog. Anything with extra potential would be great - like easy integration between the game and the site somehow? I dunno.

 

[mike]

Well, everything you've mentioned (especially the user integration part) can be done with drupal but it also depends on what exactly you want to integrate with a game. Have you anything specific in mind ?

 

[Cervator]

Nope! No clue

That's why it is still such an open area - I personally really haven't put any thought into the website.

Maybe fun metrics from the game? If we make some way for the client to send stats back to the server somehow.

 

[mike]

Ok so i'm waiting for begla to write some arguments fr using ROR

and what about vanilla bulletin board ? You wan't to wait with it when i'll make a main page?

 

[Cervator]

I'd be happy to see how it works sometime. Don't really have time to read up on it myself tho

 

[mike]

But do you prefer to see it in action as a whole package with website and wiki ? I can set it up [forum] on my server to let you all test this thing

 

[Cervator]

I'd personally like to see whole package, but if you toss a basic forum install online and prep a few quick things I'll be happy to take a look

Examples:

* 2+ forums with at least one access controlled to some degree
* A test user or two with specific group membership to different forums (or other features?); admin user with admin panel access (feel free to PM user/pass to keep them secret)
* A few random posts, maybe with an attachment, image, any other shiny stuff
* Anything unusual from phpBB / "normal" forums, like you mentioned stuff specific to help development / projects?

 

[Kai Kratz]

Mantis bugtracker would be my personal wish for a new setup, don't care for wikis they are usually hopelessly outdated. Stickies in a forum work much better imo or blog posts.

To sum it up id like
Terasology.org
- blog entries for acknowledged devs. Devs ould be able to blog posts, scsreenshots, vids etc. No need to individual blog sites (dont think we create so much posts for this to work good)
- public / private forum
- links to YT / twitter / facebook / g+ accounts (Cervator you need to make a g+ page for us btw)
- links to github (there are a couple of hooks available from github - some sort of last issue or last commit tracking on the frontpage would be nice.)
- hook up github to mantis or other bugtracker
- publish some stats from mantis and jenkins
- integrate jenkins to deploy install targets to the page on tagging the master branch(object tags only)

Would be cool if the page was kept in a as flat as possible hierarchy. Most things id like to see are integration stuff / automation. And I really like to see the dev process be as open as possible.

 

[mike]

Ok guys, here is the test forum: http://mb.vegspot.net/forum/
with two users created (login/pass):
* user1/user1
* user2/user2

User1 has a privilege to see 'Custom permissions 1' category, user2 'Custom permissions 2' category.

It's hard to point anything unusual cause this whole script is way different. I was working with phpbb a lot and i personally hate it and hate it's archaic aproach to some things (like installings MODs). This vanilla forum have some basic setup but there are a lot of plugins (not MODs! ) which can upgrade it's functionality. Let's test it

 

[Cervator]

Finally had a a chance to check it out - thanks for setting it up

First impression is that it is certainly a very clean and uncluttered setup. Only... I kinda like having lots of little icons and things all over the place

I can see how that would appeal to some users though. There are probably things that could be enabled?

For the editor on posting I don't see any special features at all - unlike here where we get a nice toolbar with extras, typical smileys, etc.... oh, or I could look in the admin panel and enable the WYSIWYG plugin. Although that just seems to use HTML?

My biggest concern however is the fact that it is a commercial project with a free version - exemplified perfectly in this update announcing "badges" which seem like they might be a good feature, especially for a public site (little less apt for us, at least for now): http://vanillaforums.com/blog/news/intr ... nd-badges/

wot February 29
Member
I just registered for free trial but I don't see the Badge and Reaction plugins.
Is it only for paid plans-?
LincolnLincoln February 29
Staff
@wot Yes, it's only for paid plans. Free plans are extremely limited.

My emphasis added for that last part. That's a massive downer IMHO, if not instant disqualification

As for the pricing, I looked real quick - for the smallest version it is $50 a month and the fanciest with the most extras is an amazing $550 a month - which I don't even understand, who would even pay that much for a forum? :?